Intro

As part of my ongoing graduate work in Intelligence Studies, I am sharing some of the discussion I do in these courses. This post marks the end of the first semester I took; one more thing to post from that semester, and that is the final paper...well, I have to look back at the other assignments focusing on the paper and see if there is significant difference to justify posting those as well.

I also need to go back and work on the posts I outlined in the last intel post.

Question

what do you believe the most critical future challenges within the next five years? Your recommended challenge can come from IC structure, focus, strategy or any other relevant topic. Remember the IC and its' national structure is an element of national power.

Answer

I am going to limit my discussion to the two most important challenges in my opinion, for the are the challenges from which the other challenges can spring. We’ll be able to see that we take a short overview of the challenges the IC faces in the future. We can also see that these challenges are often interlaced with each other. The Aspen Institute video, Mission Accomplished, (2013) notes the problem of balancing privacy, security, budgeting, and effectiveness.

The two most important are politics and critical thinking (not to be confused with “critical studies”, which are the exact opposite of critical thinking), but there are a myriad of challenges to consider:

• The constant need to reform/re-organize the IC...perhaps we should rename the intelligence cycle to the “reformation cycle”. I think we can see how politics has affected this in our discussions in Weeks, 1,4,5, and 6.
• Related to politics are the cluster of theories regarding organizational failure through rent-seeking (growth complex/burrocratic politics/ “the iron law of burrocracy”); when organizations seek to advance the organization instead of advancing the mission they were created to achieve.
• The prior two challenges are linked to issues of legislative oversight.
• Media coverage is definitely related to politics, and affects legislative oversight. This is due to a problem that Ormad (2012) raises, that “spying” as a business has a bad public image in the first place.
• The danger of abuse in domestic security will always be a prime example of a challenge in balancing several threats. Go too far and you violate the Constitution, or attempt a coup...go too little and get another 9/11. This is an inherently political problem.
• Privatization of the IC is a major challenge. Looked at cynically, this is a problem caused by politics, or in it’s best light, a failure of critical thinking in foreseeing the consequences of heavy reliance on private contractors.
• Fallibility of the analytic process (Hammond, 2010); this is a critical thinking issue that can often be associated with cognitive bias. Agrell (2012) quotes Andrew, “there has been a widespread assumption that the experience of all previous generations is irrelevant to present policy. Institutions, like individuals, however, diminish their effectiveness if they fail to reflect on past successes and failures.”
• Specifically speaking, the “Black Swan” phenomena is based on a limitation of threat analysis to “conventional” threats, or those threats that have already caused damage, as opposed to the idea of understanding all potential threats.
• Technology is going to impact the future of how the IC operates. Warner (2012) notes that “technology’s impact on intelligence has been incompletely examined.” However, Agrell (2012) argues that technology has been misused as a “universal solution”. I would argue that this is a case of a failure in critical thinking in how we view our IC organization and management.
• Studies of the intelligence field will identify, create, and (possibly) resolve challenges in the future. Warner (2102) discusses the potential here, but as we discussed in Week 2, there is the potential for fundamentally bad theory such as postmodern “thought” to be included in the design of operations or organization. This can be looked at the result of heavy leftist influence in academia (“critical” studies, tc.), and can also seen as both an example of politics and the failure of critical thinking.
• The ever present threat of insider leaks is a challenge to consider as well.

References:
Agrell, W. (2012). The Next 100 Years? Reflections on the Future of Intelligence. Intelligence and National Security, 27(1), 118–132. https://doi.org/10.1080/02684527.2012.621601

Hammond, T. H. (2010). Intelligence Organizations and the Organization of Intelligence. International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, 23(4), 680–724. https://doi.org/10.1080/08850601003780987

Mission Accomplished? Has the Intelligence Community Connected All the Dots? (2013). Retrieved from

Omand, S. D. (2012). Into the Future: A Comment on Agrell and Warner. Intelligence and National Security, 27(1), 154–156. https://doi.org/10.1080/02684527.2012.621610

Warner, M. (2012). Reflections on Technology and Intelligence Systems. Intelligence and National Security, 27(1), 133–153. https://doi.org/10.1080/02684527.2012.621604

WEEK 8: Future Challenges within the IC - Lesson Overview.(n.d.). Retrieved November 27, 2019,

Discussion

I agree that DNI should have full budgetary control over the IC...with the exception of the DOD components.
Information gathered through DOD agencies should always be processed up to ODNI,and all information that does not compromise means and sources should be passed onto the DOD components; and of course, that intel can be shared when it becomes a matter of threat for the DOD's area of responsibility.
This goes beyond Title 10/Title 50 considerations, however. The military has a significantly different mission and toolset than the other agencies.
On the other hand, the State Department's INR should be rolled into the ODNI as a liaison service to coordinate State's needs and collection efforts with the IC.

---

You chose a great subject to discuss. Considering China's use of soft power (including the funding of influence centers on a number of American college campuses), it's informationwar capabilities, and it's likely compromise of American politicians, the challenge the IC faces in dealing with the Chinese threat is huge.
And there is a certain point where informationwar melds with cyber operations. Instead of looking at each mode of warfare separately, we should look at them as points on a continuum, from conventional war (and nuclear/WMD at the extreme) to the use of soft power at the other end. The middle of the continuum contains a large expanse of covert/clandestine activity, including cyber operations.

---

"emerging challenges and enduring challenges "
That is a good way to look at threats; hopefully the use of that model could mitigate some of the "Black Swan" events from coming as such a surprise. It is impossible to prevent some of those events from occurring, but knowing about the threat in advance could improve the reaction to those events.
And as far as coming off unnaturally, it is common for many people dealing with online communication to feel that way. We are missing a lot of nonverbal communication through this process, which tends to make us feel there is something "off".
On the bright side, I have read two different studies that argue this mode of grad school discussion is superior to traditional means. I agree with that, and would say that writing is the basis of all other communication skills.

NOTES

Agrell, Wilhelm. 2012. "The Next 100 Years? Reflections on the Future of Intelligence." Intelligence and National Security 27, no. 1: 118-132.

“ Will future intelligence
represent a new era, completely detached from the past, where history would
be irrelevant or even misleading? Christopher Andrew, in the concluding
chapter of his account of MI5, argues forcefully against this notion: ‘For the
first time in recorded history, there has been a widespread assumption that
the experience of all previous generations is irrelevant to present policy.
Institutions, like individuals, however, diminish their effectiveness if they fail
to reflect on past successes and failures’.”

“ the least likely of all
unlikely prediction about the future of intelligence must be that it will
remain as we know it today, that intelligence will develop along familiar
lines and that we simply have to extend and extrapolate the trends of the
past years, decades or century”

ME: history repeats itself so very opften because humans are the same animals we were when we first start wearing clothes

“ intelligence is constantly restarted throughout history”

“ he
past is not a scheme, cases or ‘lessons’ are seldom as unambiguous as they
are presented and taught.”

“ where intelligence rose to become a
core element in national and eventually international security, and in the
course of this also transformed from amateurism to a profession, or rather a
field of professions”

“ if the perception of twenty-first-century intelligence as simply a
continuing gradual process of adaptation and modernization would end up
as a rather poor one”

ME: dude, are you even reading your own article?

“ impact of technological change”

“ The evolution of the means of warfare was perhaps the most powerful
dynamic factor affecting the conduct of intelligence to the end of the Cold
War. Intelligence grew into large structures with thousands or tens of
thousands of employees and innumerable agents, subcontractors or assets,
not primarily due to bureaucratic momentum, which set in later, but
originally to meet the demand for intelligence from new means of warfare
that certainly resorted to, or was preparing to resort to, the employment of
destructive force.”

“ If the ways intelligence services operate remain a black box for most
policymakers, its darkest corner is probably signals intelligence. A
potentially important development, however, is the opening up of this
black box, or rather black chamber, through the pressure of legislation and
systems for approval of access to electronic communications affecting the
citizens. These kinds of judicial and institutional processes tend to be
incremental and never-ending. Furthermore the changes that they constitute
are often more permanent than developments on the organizational level,
and the major consequences are often indirect and – at least originally –
unintentional”

“ It is necessary, however, to underline that a substantial part of twentiethcentury intelligence was the structures and techniques developed and
employed by totalitarian systems and authoritarian regimes, especially in
the field of domestic surveillance and political control. These aspects of the
development of intelligence as an institutional, constitutional and legal
phenomenon cannot simply be regarded as temporary exceptions. The
totalitarian and authoritarian experience had, and continues to have, a
profound impact on intelligence, both in terms of the institutional
sustainability discussed above, and in a more indirect way through the
diffusion of methods, organizational principles and perceptions of professionalism, perhaps best illustrated by the massive re-cycling of the German
intelligence heritage after the Second World War.”

“ Intelligence has throughout history been a problematic activity when it
comes to a wider social acceptance, often for very good reasons. The spy is
an occasional hero, especially in his or her virtual role in popular culture,
but also a loathed traitor. And while most citizens might accept that their
own country resort to spying or other form of intelligence activities
abroad, the acceptance of domestic surveillance and especially systematic
intelligence gathering is far more conditional and fluctuating. Spying, under
whatever euphemism, is never generally liked nor accepted. “

“ . What
did not change in a corresponding way was the underlying theory of
cognition, the idea that in the end intelligence is about facts, about the ‘real’
world, and that this will be revealed more or less by itself through a linear
and to an increasing extent industrialized knowledge-production system.21
Maybe because of this conviction, and the immense expansion of intelligence
collection and use (and misuse) of technology as the universal solution to
almost every upcoming intelligence task or problem, analysis has remained a
small and sometimes insignificant by-pass link in the huge intelligence
machinery. Analysis has not only been diminutive in terms of staff and
financial resources, it has also, due to the design of the intelligence cycle and
its assumed rationality, been assigned a reactive role, often far down the
intelligence assembly line.”

“ There has been only limited and scattered
development of the field since the publication of Sherman Kent’s classical
book on strategic intelligence in 1949.23 Kent argued for the introduction of
scientific methods in intelligence, not only to comprehend specific problems
and fields but to make verifiable assessments. The non-development of a
scientific approach to an array of analytic problems is a striking feature of
twentieth-century intelligence; there is not only an ‘under-theorization’ in
the study of intelligence and the impact of intelligence on international
relations, as Christopher Andrew observes,24 but also a crucial undertheorization in intelligence itself”

Warner, Michael. 2012. "Reflections on Technology and Intelligence Systems." Intelligence and National Security 27, no. 1: 133-153.

“ technology’s impact on intelligence has been
incompletely examined”

Omand, David. 2012. "Into the Future: A Comment on Agrell and Warner." Intelligence and National Security 27, no. 1: 154-156.

“ Advantage is to be found at three levels of intelligence work. The first is
the provision of situational awareness, answering the questions ‘what, who,
where and when?’. For example, information about the insurgent, terrorist
or criminal network, where it is based, who is involved, how it is financed
and so on. The second level might be described as the provision of
explanation, answering the question ‘why?’, to allow understanding of what
is going on and the motivations and goals of those involved, and the cultures
in which they operate. The third level, much the most important but also the
most problematic, is answering the question ‘what next?’, allowing
prediction of movements, actions and developments and thus depriving
the adversary of the impact of surprise.”

“ We must recognize that for the
democracies, the days of the Cold War ‘secret state’ have given way to those
of ‘the protecting state’ and their intelligence communities will have to
reflect that in their relationship with the public. A new understanding is
needed between parliament and government on behalf of the people and
their security and intelligence authorities as to what the former are prepared
to support as being done in their name by the latter in the interests of their
security. An understanding that will underpin public security but, as Agrell
concludes, ‘to the degree that that this will be perceived as politically, legally
and ethically acceptable or at least tolerable’’

Erwin, Marshall Curtis. 2013. Intelligence Issues for Congress, Congressional Research Service RL33539. (August) http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/intel/RL33539.pdf

“ Information Sharing vs. Information Overload
“

The Aspen Institute. “Mission Accomplished? Has the Intelligence Community Connected All the Dots?” Posted on July 18, 2013. Accessed August 10, 2014.

accomplishments that cant bee publicized

line privacy security

hindsgiht is 20/20

I would have been more enraged if I had found a case in which NSA activities had caused inconvienence damage or harm to an American
Adm. Dennis Blair (Ret.), Former Director of National Intelligence

Negroponte
Squeezing water rock budget cuts natsec

balancing privacy, security, budgeting, effectiveness